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SCHOOL OF HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE RESEARCH SEMINAR SEMESTER TWO 2022 MONDAY 17th OCTOBER 2022 FROM 5:30PM Location: F23 Michael Spence Building, Level 5, Room 501 Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83458114235 [https://mcusercontent.com/377ed99b00666e1febb7dbbc0/images/c82db19b-d54f-fc61-84e0-f805f9860b8f.jpg] ELIZABETH ROBERTS-PEDERSEN 'WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO STARVE' : HUNGER IN THE BIOLOGY OF HUMAN STARVATION (1950) Abstract: Between November 1944 and October 1945, researchers from the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene at the University of Minnesota induced semi-starvation in a group of young male volunteers drawn from the Civilian Public Service labour pool. Housed for the duration of the experiment in temporary facilities under the university’s Memorial Stadium, most volunteers lost a quarter of their body weight on a semi-starvation diet designed to replicate nutritional conditions in parts of occupied Europe. In 1950 the results were published as The Biology of Human Starvation, a landmark two-volume work describing the systemic effects of undernutrition. In this publication the Minnesota researchers proposed that semi-starvation produced ‘a special kind of person’, one quantifiably different ‘morphologically, chemically, physiologically, and psychologically from his well-fed counterpart.’ Yet for all the data they compiled, the researchers struggled to conclusively quantify or describe a fundamental element of the experiment: the volunteers’ experience of hunger. In this paper I discuss the Minnesota researchers’ attempts to grasp ‘what it feels like to starve’, as The Biology of Human Starvation put it, and how these efforts can help frame a broader history of ideas about hunger. Bio: Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle, where she recently finished an ARC DECRA fellowship on the uses of psychiatry during the Second World War. She is completing two monographs under contract: one on psychiatry and suffering during the Second World War, and the other on the history of the idea of mental health. WHEN: MONDAY 17TH OCTOBER 2022 START: 5.30PM Location: F23 Michael Spence Building, Level 1, Room 501 Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83458114235 All Welcome | Registration not required | Free Copyright © *2022* *HPS, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences<*|UPDATE_PROFILE|*> or unsubscribe from this list<*|UNSUB|*>
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